The paradise unrestrained capitalism offers gets ever closer... For pardon the expression the parasites. For us hahaha no.
Sidebar: apparently there’s also an issue of travel books on Amazon written by AI, again using actual authors’ names. Of course, using AI to fake Dr. Chuck Tingle works would be going much too far...
My dotard theory is that, at least for the near to midterm future, AI won’t and can’t be better than the people developing it. OTOH, that day will come.
A second dotard theory: all the major tech developments have happened and now the VCs are desperate to push anything, no matter how crappy, to try and score again. So crap gets hyped and here we are.
Nope, not going to be ashamed for calling them parasites, because they sure as shit don't hesitate a second to call those receiving public services parasites.
I read about this author’s complaints to Amazon and I’m glad this time the issue was resolved in her favor. But it seems obvious this will happen again to others, especially ebook writers who flourish on Amazon. I can also see complaints a book is fraudulent being used as a means of harassment, causing an author’s legitimate product to be flagged as possible AI.
Also, I can’t help recalling a simpler time when we were merely worried automation would replace physical labor and displace those workers, as opposed to this endeavor to render human thought and creativity itself redundant.
I used to dream of being a writer. Wanted to be the next Asimov or Heinlein or, in college, Harlan Ellison. But the publishing industry is total shit now, there's too much competition, bookstores are struggling, and now this.
Maybe AI is responsible for those logic and fact challenged op-ed pieces in the NYT and WaPo, like that Jack Goldsmith exercise in both-siderism. Or perhaps “I didn’t write those racist tweets, AI did!” will become the way assholes like Hanania excuse their exposed opinions.
Now we see why the newspapers hide their stuff behind paywalls: as they slide rightward, the only ones with the money to get to the articles will be the ones they're written to appeal to.
Such an unfortunate time to prosecute Trump. Yes, he tried to destroy the very foundation of our society, but not now. This is the time for thoughts and prayers.
I can't recall who, but a couple of rightwing dweebs have been complaining on twitter that they have tried to prompt AI to generate racist or homophobic rants, but have been thwarted by safeguards in the program. Now, I'm sure they'll find a way to overcome this, but it appears for now not only reality but artificial intelligence has a liberal bias, LOL.
Neither new nor AI-specific. There's a "Stephen King" who publishes Kindle books. I assume it's his legal name and that's how he gets away with it. His writing is . . . well, nothing to write home about, so I'd bet the people he suckers make up most of his sales.
"I cleaned about 10k titles like this out on our library’s instance of hoopla bit they still pop up." Please tell me more. I guess I misunderstood Hoopla, which I thought was like Kanopy. You mean you have a measure of control over the offering? And that they actually stock fakes?
We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.
Why did they have to specify Papoon was Not Insane? They Knew. The GOP has become the National Surrealist Party. And it's amusing "Everything You Know Is Wrong" is based on folks like Art Bell, who's partially responsible for the conspiracy-laden reality we now inhabit.
“Schools in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa Bay and the surrounding area, are mostly assigning excerpts by the English language’s most famous writer. The schools previously required students to read two of Shakespeare’s novels or plays, in their entirety, per year.
The decision comes as educators must prepare students for a new set of state exams that cover a wide variety of subject matter, and also, “in consideration of the law,” according to a school district spokesperson, which means teaching it could open educators up to disciplinary measures if a parent were to file a complaint.
The “law” in question is the new Parental Rights in Education Act, which prohibits teaching any content that is sexual in nature.“
Well, that's just classic fashy hijinks. Make a vague law that nobody can ever be QUITE sure they're NOT violating, then allow individuals to interpret the law according to their own whim, while profiting off bribery. And the security forces never NEED an excuse to crack skulls. W's all round, really.
The naughty bits are just the excuse. Now that dotards are Saving the Children by taking over school boards and joining Moms For Liberty, they can carve out more time for Jettysin's private quarterbacking lessons by eliminating all that stupid Shakespeare they had to read in high school, and look how much they use that.
How old is Jettysin? (What I really mean is "How much time do I have before a pack of Jettysins shows up on my class roster?") I mean, I just barely survived the Kaitlyn/Kaylee onslaught of 2016.
In a way, this is just the next step in something that's been going on for ages. I have written or co-authored three books. But the last time I checked, Google says I've written FOUR books. The fourth was, indeed, "written" by me: A publisher I used to work for compiled a bunch of articles I had written over the years and cranked it out as a book with my name on it. No royalties for me, and not even a courtesy note to say "Hey! We just published this doorstop with your name on it."
While the AI thing adds another dimension, there are legions of publishers who have been buying articles from freelancers and forcing those writers to sign "all-rights" contracts. As AI advances, I wonder which genius publisher is going to be the first to slip in a clause that says the author no longer owns the rights to their own name and the publisher can generate AI titles endlessly and claim the turd was written by "award-winning author Derelict."
I’m hoping that would be an unenforceable contract, but then I remember that the Supreme Clerics have revealed that the law is actually Calvinball, so who knows?
It is, sadly, perfectly enforceable. On the plus side, though, I don't give a fuck. It's all pieces I wrote 30+ years ago, and nobody's injuring themselves running out to buy my deathless prose from 1985. I was wildly overpaid back then (like, triple what I should have been making), so I got my money up front.
"the author no longer owns the rights to their own name"
Isn't this an issue in the actors strike too? That studios want to scan you in and then use "you" however they want with no compensation? What the fuck do I know, but seems to me you could just make that shit flat-out illegal with one of those things we call "laws." Now, let me go find our nation's law-enacting body, and... oh.
It’s weird how college athletics have incorporated Name-Image-Likeness laws, while the entertainment industry has gone the opposite way and claimed that you hold no rights to your own image.
Oh, you mean the guy who can't possibly be racist because he used - I mean "worked with" - Black men as a football coach? Meanwhile, the overseer waves his arm over yonder cotton field and says, "Just lookit the diversity we got here!"
We can't legislate morality! At least, we can't legislate morality for corporations. For people, though, well, we want to know what your orivate oarts are doing at all times.
We're going to see a LOT more creators' strikes. The fucking irony of corporations ever more aggressively pissing their drawers over intellectual property, while the folks who MAKE said properties get shafted.
I partially got radicalized by wanting to do a critique of Marx and how technology invalidated Marxism. But I realized I didn't know much about it so I started reading, and, well, ended up here. And it turned out Marx STILL applies! Yeesh!
Partly because they don't understand fun, as we discussed the other day, partially because punching down isn't funny, and partially because they're lazy inept uncreative fuckers.
The day will come for each of us when HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors. My last two jobs featured a lot of people getting pushed out by automation. In the first case that included me. After that, I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering when the shoe was going to drop right on my head. It did not motivate me to greater productivity.
Two days ago, I had a surrealistic go round with an A.I. chatbot, who at least assigned a tech to deal with my fucked copper phone line. I asked the tech if he knew a phone number where I could speak to an actual human who gave an actual shit about helping customers with problems. Complex or otherwise. Nope.
I can absolutely understand how frightened the creatives are. And that may provide a bit of a silver lining. They have the ability to articulate the angst and fear the rest of us mortals face. It may not work, but at least they can go down swinging.
I suspect that all those "why remote work is bad and everybody should get back to the office like fifteen minutes ago" pieces polluting my news feed are AI generated. Must be getting lonely stuck in the office like a ... well. Like a machine 😉
Seems like a while since I did a "What's on Mornin' Joe" update, so you'll be happy to learn that Donny "I used to run an ad agency, you know!" Deutsch has been going on about this ad-nauseum. How Kids Today are missing out by being deprived of real, in-person contact with ad-agency execs like, well... Mr. Donny Deutsch.
OTOH, I've heard from several distinguished members of the legal profession that if you REALLY believe something, in your HEART OF HEARTS, then mere reality has no hold on you.
The new episode of Qanon Anonymous is about kids who watch subliminal YouTube videos to, I SHIT YOU NOT, change their eye color, grow taller, gain superpowers, and change race. Haven't listened to it yet but the podcast summary makes my head hurt. We buy our batshit insanity in bulk these days.
I always wonder about the origins of the craziness, like maybe this starts as some kind of "argument" speaking hypothetically: "Oh, so if I can choose my own gender, then I suppose I can also decide what my eye color is, and you have to accept my eyes are brown when they're obviously blue, huh?" And from there, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to "The Radical Left wants to change your kid's eye color WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT."
In my historical research on one aspect of US industrial history, I recently wrote about one of the key lawsuits that saw trademark law pivot from being about protecting the consumer from fake products, to protecting trademark owners from fake producers. This happened in the mid-19th-century before the first national trademark laws in 1870 and 1876, back when trademarks were registered and enforced at the state level.
I see another major watershed in trademark law coming with this recent development in fakery. Now one can fake a product without even needing to have any skill. At least when the American Cyclopedia would wholesale copy the Encyclopedia Britannica in the late 1800s, they had to at least re-create the maps (which caused them no end of trouble) and re-typeset it all, and the content was mostly good (except where they had to add in American topics not covered in the original.)
One interesting development in AI they're discovering is that the more computer-generated content enters the ecosystem, and then gets sucked up by these AI systems in their learning, it greatly harms the output. In other words, when AIs learn from AI-generated content, their content gets significantly worse. Seems like we've been saying "Garbage In Garbage Out" for a long time. Long live GIGO.
When I dug thru the patent office innards for info on a specific product it was because the boss said that once patented, all the pertinent details of his new design would be published, but while the patent was 'pending', not so much. His take was to look for reasons not to file for the patent but just to call it pending forever.
I did not question this at the time. Later on my head was severely abraded by my scratching...
I hope Pat Pending has as good a partner as Miles Archer did:
“When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it.”
For my patents you had about a year to file for patent once the action to approve the patent was granted. The whole thing could probably be extended to last about 3-5 years from first filing a disclosure
The quality (such as it is) of “AI” content is going to spiral downward as it eats and regurgitates its own material, like a photograph of a photograph of a photograph.
"'the national mood was a mix of exuberance, anxiety, and dread' — which seems ominously like 'see? And that all worked out!'"
I was hoping someone would mention how Charles Dickens, for example, had had his work pirated in America, and how the American press of the day basically told him to "get over it" when he complained.
In what I think was the second issue of Spy, they took a paragraph of promo copy, had it translated by a U.N. translator into...French? Italian? something...and had THAT translated into a third language, and so on, for 5 or 6 or 7 interations. And then back to English. The result was predictably hilarious. It would be interesting to see that done with AI copy being mimicked by another AI, and so on. (All of which would take, like, twenty seconds. If that.)
Gosh I hope doing that makes AI output more interesting, even hilarious. I doubt it would make the sentences less structurally sound. The nonsense factor could get good, though.
Publishers of dictionaries and maps routinely insert trap entries, false references that let them point to plagiarized work and say "Ha! Didn't do your own research, eh?"
There's a great little article from the 1870s or 80s where the publisher of the American Cyclopedia wrote to the Scottish company who made the maps for Encyclopedia Britannica saying that they (the American Publisher) were having difficulty copying the Scottish publisher's maps. Would they be willing to sell some of their plates? The Scottish publisher replied that not only wouldn't they sell any of their plates to this "pirate," but they would continue to improve their maps so as to continue to befuddle the thieves trying to steal their work.
"when AIs learn from AI-generated content, their content gets significantly worse."
Fascinating. I can't recall seeing this point before. Now, if we can't tell the difference easily, at scale, who's going to prevent the LLMs from degenerating?!
"Friedman says she filed an infringement report through Amazon’s official form as soon as she discovered the books and received an automated response."
If not now, then sometime soon that "automated response" may come from the very bot that wrote the phony books, or maybe one of their A.I. friends.
"I don’t think LaFrance is dealing in bad faith, or unperceptive..."
Forget it Jake, it's The Atlantic.
I guess our "thought leaders" are just taking it as given that mere laws would be useless here, a case of King Canute commanding the tides. So just pull up your socks and work harder, we'll out-compete those machines yet! Bullshit. Giving up on the main tool we use to regulate human behavior (and especially commercial behavior) is just stupid fatalism, of the sort that conservatives have always engaged in.
The paradise unrestrained capitalism offers gets ever closer... For pardon the expression the parasites. For us hahaha no.
Sidebar: apparently there’s also an issue of travel books on Amazon written by AI, again using actual authors’ names. Of course, using AI to fake Dr. Chuck Tingle works would be going much too far...
My dotard theory is that, at least for the near to midterm future, AI won’t and can’t be better than the people developing it. OTOH, that day will come.
A second dotard theory: all the major tech developments have happened and now the VCs are desperate to push anything, no matter how crappy, to try and score again. So crap gets hyped and here we are.
Well, Dr Chuck has gone mosta the way there already, so...
No, no, no. My point is that AI faking Dr. Tingle’s works is going too far.
I'm hip, but doncha think he's mosta the way to too far already? I mean, haven't read him, but the descriptions suggest he's tryin' hard...
From what I’ve read of his work, the “books” are kind like *very* extended jokes.
But, you know, you let AI forge a Tingle work, next thing AI will be rewriting the Bible. Gotta shut it down it can still be done.
No way an AI could come up with something as bugfuck crazy as the Bible.
Now that you mention it, I’d like to see what AI would do to Leviticus and it might be able to resolve the contradictions in the four gospels.
OTOH, maybe it would just produce gibberish.
Someone should write a novel (or whatever) about a cult that forms around an AI-generated holy book.
Nope, not going to be ashamed for calling them parasites, because they sure as shit don't hesitate a second to call those receiving public services parasites.
Pounded in the ass by an AI writing fake books in my name would be an interesting book for Dr. Tingle to write
😂
Yeah...
South Dakota: Too Much Fun!
Hey, it's rally week. So, Show Us Your Tits!!!!
Oooh, isn't Antifa coming to cause trouble? Like they don't do every year?
I don't know, Lita Ford is playing and she often scares off antifa and uncle fa too
We were just there a couple weeks ago. But I guess you live there…
I read about this author’s complaints to Amazon and I’m glad this time the issue was resolved in her favor. But it seems obvious this will happen again to others, especially ebook writers who flourish on Amazon. I can also see complaints a book is fraudulent being used as a means of harassment, causing an author’s legitimate product to be flagged as possible AI.
Also, I can’t help recalling a simpler time when we were merely worried automation would replace physical labor and displace those workers, as opposed to this endeavor to render human thought and creativity itself redundant.
I’m sure we can solve this problem if we just teach more STEM.
STEM HARDER
Hey some of us are doing that already
STEM the tide of science illiteracy!
I used to dream of being a writer. Wanted to be the next Asimov or Heinlein or, in college, Harlan Ellison. But the publishing industry is total shit now, there's too much competition, bookstores are struggling, and now this.
Now, now...if we all simply AI a little harder, I'm certain that, together, we can achieve something brackish and aflame.
Note: AI might or might not have been consulted in the composition of that last sentence.
Makes sense to me!
Maybe AI is responsible for those logic and fact challenged op-ed pieces in the NYT and WaPo, like that Jack Goldsmith exercise in both-siderism. Or perhaps “I didn’t write those racist tweets, AI did!” will become the way assholes like Hanania excuse their exposed opinions.
ICYMI, this thoroughly skewered that Hack Goldsmith piece:
https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2023/08/how-to-launder-right-wing-talking-points.html
Seems like every day is a good day to have cancelled your Times subscription months ago.
Now we see why the newspapers hide their stuff behind paywalls: as they slide rightward, the only ones with the money to get to the articles will be the ones they're written to appeal to.
Paywall Street Journal, then. . .
The WSJ should be paywalled, sealed in a barrel of concrete, and fired into the sun.
So much for the tolerant left!
Damn I wish I'd said that.
2 marks.
Such an unfortunate time to prosecute Trump. Yes, he tried to destroy the very foundation of our society, but not now. This is the time for thoughts and prayers.
Thoughts 1, Prayers 0
This whole shitshow is based on the fact that a significant fraction of America is more concerned with Prayers than Thoughts.
The people trying to destroy our system will lose faith in the system!
No faith to lose.
Fascism's just another word for...
No woman, no cry
I can't recall who, but a couple of rightwing dweebs have been complaining on twitter that they have tried to prompt AI to generate racist or homophobic rants, but have been thwarted by safeguards in the program. Now, I'm sure they'll find a way to overcome this, but it appears for now not only reality but artificial intelligence has a liberal bias, LOL.
Point of order: it’s Xitter now, and yes, pronounce the X as /sh/.
I will call it "X" at the same time I start referring to 6th as Avenue of the Americas, which is to say, never, LOL.
Not acknowledging the X makes Feline Musk cry. /RodFlanders
Of course, there is nothing to be learned from the fact that there are some things that even AI won't do.
Well, they did the first time they tried to train AI using the internet. But the AI writers learned this was unacceptable
Have we ever ACTUALLY seen David Brooks? Or Hugh Hewitt?
I thought David Brooks too. But his stuff is so idiosyncratically DB. Ergo, he's already a replicant.
To be fair, most of Brooks’s time is spent lamenting the corrosive social effects of deli meats.
Well, Christ - if the meat's corrosive, just don't eat it! And don't staple baloney to your forehead. It ain't rocket surgery.
It's so sad to have a friend who can't pronounce prosciutto.
David Brooks' birthday is this week
We all celebrate on Fuck an Intern Friday.
I think his current wife was a research assistant rather than an intern
Opportunity Knox!
Neither new nor AI-specific. There's a "Stephen King" who publishes Kindle books. I assume it's his legal name and that's how he gets away with it. His writing is . . . well, nothing to write home about, so I'd bet the people he suckers make up most of his sales.
"I cleaned about 10k titles like this out on our library’s instance of hoopla bit they still pop up." Please tell me more. I guess I misunderstood Hoopla, which I thought was like Kanopy. You mean you have a measure of control over the offering? And that they actually stock fakes?
I hope Morgue for Whores wasn't written by an AI
You can't be serious
I don't know, I don't think I have ever tried.
Too close to the bone?
We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.
- Phillip K Dick
High on acid, 50 years or so ago
" Everything you know is wrong"
Firesign Theatre. 49 years ago.
“There’s something wrong here”
David Lynch at multiple ominous points in Twin Peaks
" where we're from , the birds sing a pretty song..."
- Little Man
At first I thought you meant this guy, and I was so excited to see him name-checked on REBID http://www.littlemanmusic.com
https://youtu.be/h0YI_eHg3Aw
A worthy pairing.
Marc Bolan tribute- guy has good taste!
Why did they have to specify Papoon was Not Insane? They Knew. The GOP has become the National Surrealist Party. And it's amusing "Everything You Know Is Wrong" is based on folks like Art Bell, who's partially responsible for the conspiracy-laden reality we now inhabit.
"I WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE COMET!"
All Hail Discordia!
Unfortunately I had a hot dog today, and, as it's not Friday, I violated Erisian doctrine.
Which is *exactly what she wants*.
Like "Idiocracy", every time I listen to Firesign these days it's more documentary than satirical. I mean, seriously, WTFF?
Listening to "Give Me Immortality Or Give Me Death" hit really differently during the first COVID weeks.
The Firesign Theatre weren't just funny and they weren't just perceptive in their satire of what they saw around them. They were incredibly prescient.
Hostility to the humanities in action:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/shakespeare-cut-florida-schools-desantis-agenda-1234802500/
“Schools in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa Bay and the surrounding area, are mostly assigning excerpts by the English language’s most famous writer. The schools previously required students to read two of Shakespeare’s novels or plays, in their entirety, per year.
The decision comes as educators must prepare students for a new set of state exams that cover a wide variety of subject matter, and also, “in consideration of the law,” according to a school district spokesperson, which means teaching it could open educators up to disciplinary measures if a parent were to file a complaint.
The “law” in question is the new Parental Rights in Education Act, which prohibits teaching any content that is sexual in nature.“
Ah. So no sex among the humanity then?
Where'd all these damn storks come from alla sudden??!!
Just make the law vague enough and people will restrict themselves, more than you could have ever hoped for.
And copsgo "oh, yeah – THAT's a good law!"
Well, that's just classic fashy hijinks. Make a vague law that nobody can ever be QUITE sure they're NOT violating, then allow individuals to interpret the law according to their own whim, while profiting off bribery. And the security forces never NEED an excuse to crack skulls. W's all round, really.
The naughty bits are just the excuse. Now that dotards are Saving the Children by taking over school boards and joining Moms For Liberty, they can carve out more time for Jettysin's private quarterbacking lessons by eliminating all that stupid Shakespeare they had to read in high school, and look how much they use that.
They should really teach Jacobean revenge tragedies. Now there are some life lessons you can use!
How old is Jettysin? (What I really mean is "How much time do I have before a pack of Jettysins shows up on my class roster?") I mean, I just barely survived the Kaitlyn/Kaylee onslaught of 2016.
Do they make the football players go to class in Badgerland?
Badgers? I don't have no badgers. We don't need no badgers! I don't have to show you any steenking badgers!!!
Never gotten close enough to a badger to smell one, but I can well imagine.
I'll take that as a "no."
Hut 1, Hut 2, Brute´!
et tu Bern
You will find me in my hut
I will be the substack nut
We'll have a lotta little nonsense jollies
Then realize it's all just follies...
"...two of Shakespeare's novels..."
Um...
Huckleberry and Juliet.
The Merchant of Wuthering Heights.
Green Eggs and Hamlet.
The Tragedy of King Richard the Third Policeman
Tom Jones and Cressida
The Merchant of Venus
You want arms with that?
Night of the Avenging Blowfish
Shakespeare for Squirrels
https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-for-Squirrels-A-Novel/dp/B07WXKHVRV/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=Christopher+Moore&qid=1691608151&s=audible&sr=1-3
Are these the same "Classical Education" schools that banned Michelangelo's David?
Filthy penii.
I've heard it gets cleaned regularly by someone with white gloves, a bottle of distilled water and a Q-tip.
Stay out of my house
'corporations don’t give a shit, and indeed are “already memorizing the platitudes necessary to wave away the critics.” '
This right here is why IT ALL WORKS. Il fascisti wingtipo pre-select the outcome via the handwave of despair.
In a way, this is just the next step in something that's been going on for ages. I have written or co-authored three books. But the last time I checked, Google says I've written FOUR books. The fourth was, indeed, "written" by me: A publisher I used to work for compiled a bunch of articles I had written over the years and cranked it out as a book with my name on it. No royalties for me, and not even a courtesy note to say "Hey! We just published this doorstop with your name on it."
While the AI thing adds another dimension, there are legions of publishers who have been buying articles from freelancers and forcing those writers to sign "all-rights" contracts. As AI advances, I wonder which genius publisher is going to be the first to slip in a clause that says the author no longer owns the rights to their own name and the publisher can generate AI titles endlessly and claim the turd was written by "award-winning author Derelict."
At least you can point to it with a perplexed and baleful glare and say "Hey That's MY doorstop!"
I’m hoping that would be an unenforceable contract, but then I remember that the Supreme Clerics have revealed that the law is actually Calvinball, so who knows?
I'm assuming it would be upheld under the long-standing legal principle "We have a fuckton of lawyers and you don't, loser."
It is, sadly, perfectly enforceable. On the plus side, though, I don't give a fuck. It's all pieces I wrote 30+ years ago, and nobody's injuring themselves running out to buy my deathless prose from 1985. I was wildly overpaid back then (like, triple what I should have been making), so I got my money up front.
À la Recherche du Merde Perdu
That's "Merdre", citizen!
Non, c’est <<merdre>>, citoyen!
And the citron preserves that new-car smell!
"the author no longer owns the rights to their own name"
Isn't this an issue in the actors strike too? That studios want to scan you in and then use "you" however they want with no compensation? What the fuck do I know, but seems to me you could just make that shit flat-out illegal with one of those things we call "laws." Now, let me go find our nation's law-enacting body, and... oh.
It’s weird how college athletics have incorporated Name-Image-Likeness laws, while the entertainment industry has gone the opposite way and claimed that you hold no rights to your own image.
Coach Tommy Tuberville is in the Senate right now trying to repeal that. Just so you're wondering.
Oh, you mean the guy who can't possibly be racist because he used - I mean "worked with" - Black men as a football coach? Meanwhile, the overseer waves his arm over yonder cotton field and says, "Just lookit the diversity we got here!"
We can't legislate morality! At least, we can't legislate morality for corporations. For people, though, well, we want to know what your orivate oarts are doing at all times.
I googled "orivate oarts" and it didn't disappoint. Damn, those AI search engines are gettin' good.
At ease, Oarts.
We're going to see a LOT more creators' strikes. The fucking irony of corporations ever more aggressively pissing their drawers over intellectual property, while the folks who MAKE said properties get shafted.
I partially got radicalized by wanting to do a critique of Marx and how technology invalidated Marxism. But I realized I didn't know much about it so I started reading, and, well, ended up here. And it turned out Marx STILL applies! Yeesh!
It'll open the door for the behemoth that is Conservative comedy! It's just waiting in the wings, having been held back by Hollywood libs!
You've probably seen it, but as a gift to anyone who hasn't, Some More News with Why is Conservative Comedy So... Not Very Good?
https://youtu.be/KSXKzPOcYDU
Partly because they don't understand fun, as we discussed the other day, partially because punching down isn't funny, and partially because they're lazy inept uncreative fuckers.
Will a rogue AI be able to make conservative comedy… funny?!
The day will come for each of us when HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors. My last two jobs featured a lot of people getting pushed out by automation. In the first case that included me. After that, I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering when the shoe was going to drop right on my head. It did not motivate me to greater productivity.
Two days ago, I had a surrealistic go round with an A.I. chatbot, who at least assigned a tech to deal with my fucked copper phone line. I asked the tech if he knew a phone number where I could speak to an actual human who gave an actual shit about helping customers with problems. Complex or otherwise. Nope.
I can absolutely understand how frightened the creatives are. And that may provide a bit of a silver lining. They have the ability to articulate the angst and fear the rest of us mortals face. It may not work, but at least they can go down swinging.
Open the Lactivation Pod bay doors, Hal.
I suspect that all those "why remote work is bad and everybody should get back to the office like fifteen minutes ago" pieces polluting my news feed are AI generated. Must be getting lonely stuck in the office like a ... well. Like a machine 😉
Once The People® all go back to the office does that mean all the AI bots will have to work from home?
Ah, don't sell us humans short. Our opinion-generating hive-mind can still generate dreck by the megaton, no machine assistance required.
If all that expensive office space sits empty, it’s worthless—so get back in the office, serfs!
That water cooler isn't going to waste time by itself!
Seems like a while since I did a "What's on Mornin' Joe" update, so you'll be happy to learn that Donny "I used to run an ad agency, you know!" Deutsch has been going on about this ad-nauseum. How Kids Today are missing out by being deprived of real, in-person contact with ad-agency execs like, well... Mr. Donny Deutsch.
If the AI version is called Donny Douche, it will not all been for naught.
How is it that I've been hearing this jerk for YEARS and never thought of that? I think my Snark-o-Tron is broke.
Snarkotron reads like the name Shakespeare considered before settling on Rosencrantz
Ride the wild serfs back to the office!
And if a few of them get uppity, hang 10!
" - that perfect dystopian tone and holds the form of its anti-logic parabola perfectly -"
I hold this phrase in high admiration.
I just got a call " Hey -Do you want to sit in on this budget meeting?"
" I would, but I'm busy discussing the nature of reality with my online friends"
- Pause -
" OK we'll be in the downstairs conference room if you can get free,"
Well, at least you work in an industry that understands in some detail the workings of physical reality...rooted, as it were...
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away -
Phllip K. Dick.
Damn.
Does this mean Queens Man is REAL?
We Are Doomed.
OTOH, I've heard from several distinguished members of the legal profession that if you REALLY believe something, in your HEART OF HEARTS, then mere reality has no hold on you.
The new episode of Qanon Anonymous is about kids who watch subliminal YouTube videos to, I SHIT YOU NOT, change their eye color, grow taller, gain superpowers, and change race. Haven't listened to it yet but the podcast summary makes my head hurt. We buy our batshit insanity in bulk these days.
I always wonder about the origins of the craziness, like maybe this starts as some kind of "argument" speaking hypothetically: "Oh, so if I can choose my own gender, then I suppose I can also decide what my eye color is, and you have to accept my eyes are brown when they're obviously blue, huh?" And from there, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to "The Radical Left wants to change your kid's eye color WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT."
Unlike birds, plants are real!
So, no tweets – just beets then?
These writers should stop whining. They’re getting valuable exposure without even having to pay for it. Welcome to the photographer’s world.
Oof.
Even "my kid takes great photos on his phone" can't top that.
In my historical research on one aspect of US industrial history, I recently wrote about one of the key lawsuits that saw trademark law pivot from being about protecting the consumer from fake products, to protecting trademark owners from fake producers. This happened in the mid-19th-century before the first national trademark laws in 1870 and 1876, back when trademarks were registered and enforced at the state level.
I see another major watershed in trademark law coming with this recent development in fakery. Now one can fake a product without even needing to have any skill. At least when the American Cyclopedia would wholesale copy the Encyclopedia Britannica in the late 1800s, they had to at least re-create the maps (which caused them no end of trouble) and re-typeset it all, and the content was mostly good (except where they had to add in American topics not covered in the original.)
One interesting development in AI they're discovering is that the more computer-generated content enters the ecosystem, and then gets sucked up by these AI systems in their learning, it greatly harms the output. In other words, when AIs learn from AI-generated content, their content gets significantly worse. Seems like we've been saying "Garbage In Garbage Out" for a long time. Long live GIGO.
When I dug thru the patent office innards for info on a specific product it was because the boss said that once patented, all the pertinent details of his new design would be published, but while the patent was 'pending', not so much. His take was to look for reasons not to file for the patent but just to call it pending forever.
I did not question this at the time. Later on my head was severely abraded by my scratching...
Should have called on the services of Pat Pending, Private Eye.
I hope Pat Pending has as good a partner as Miles Archer did:
“When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it.”
"...you're supposed to do something about it [even if you were sleeping with his wife]"
and also even if you are lobbying to throw the gunsel under the bus.
Why not? He really did shoot Thursby.
What are you supposed to do when it was you that shot him?
Standing my ground, I was.
For my patents you had about a year to file for patent once the action to approve the patent was granted. The whole thing could probably be extended to last about 3-5 years from first filing a disclosure
I think that 5-year deal was where we landed, and by that point we no longer made the thing anyway...
The quality (such as it is) of “AI” content is going to spiral downward as it eats and regurgitates its own material, like a photograph of a photograph of a photograph.
pixels all the way down
Ah, but what if other AI's are the only ones who bother to READ this shit any more? Gotcha there!
We built this AI to read all the crap so YOU don't have too!
We built this AI on rock and roll
It's gotta a black beak – toucan glues it
I think I’m starting to understand why Skynet decided to take humanity out…
"'the national mood was a mix of exuberance, anxiety, and dread' — which seems ominously like 'see? And that all worked out!'"
I was hoping someone would mention how Charles Dickens, for example, had had his work pirated in America, and how the American press of the day basically told him to "get over it" when he complained.
Which is why I am forever a Berne Bro.
In what I think was the second issue of Spy, they took a paragraph of promo copy, had it translated by a U.N. translator into...French? Italian? something...and had THAT translated into a third language, and so on, for 5 or 6 or 7 interations. And then back to English. The result was predictably hilarious. It would be interesting to see that done with AI copy being mimicked by another AI, and so on. (All of which would take, like, twenty seconds. If that.)
Gosh I hope doing that makes AI output more interesting, even hilarious. I doubt it would make the sentences less structurally sound. The nonsense factor could get good, though.
Sounds like Jimmy James "Macho Business Donkey Wrestler"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD5Hgzayhj8&t=1s
Hrm, the situation just might sort itself out.
Because once the AI output is exposed as ridiculous nonsense, there won't be any market for it, right? I mean, [waves arms about generally]
Well, I hear this Free Market thing eliminates inferior products, so it'll OF COURSE stop the Bad AI Writing! Of course.
Publishers of dictionaries and maps routinely insert trap entries, false references that let them point to plagiarized work and say "Ha! Didn't do your own research, eh?"
There's a great little article from the 1870s or 80s where the publisher of the American Cyclopedia wrote to the Scottish company who made the maps for Encyclopedia Britannica saying that they (the American Publisher) were having difficulty copying the Scottish publisher's maps. Would they be willing to sell some of their plates? The Scottish publisher replied that not only wouldn't they sell any of their plates to this "pirate," but they would continue to improve their maps so as to continue to befuddle the thieves trying to steal their work.
"when AIs learn from AI-generated content, their content gets significantly worse."
Fascinating. I can't recall seeing this point before. Now, if we can't tell the difference easily, at scale, who's going to prevent the LLMs from degenerating?!
"Friedman says she filed an infringement report through Amazon’s official form as soon as she discovered the books and received an automated response."
If not now, then sometime soon that "automated response" may come from the very bot that wrote the phony books, or maybe one of their A.I. friends.
So... like the cops, then? "We investigated ourselves, and found we did nothing wrong!"
That was what I expected.
“tapping a ‘Like’ button is not friendship”
Anybody who spouts dimestore profundities like this ought to be forced to run laps as punishment, like in grade school PE.
Just to be absolutely clear, I liked your comment, but my wife and I won't be coming over to dinner tonight.
Hearted for...ah, crap...
And, as I'm sure you realize, I'm Not Here To Make Friends.
You settling for influencing us, then?
Sadly, my influencer cred is nonexistent.
No free cans of Bud Light for you!
"I don’t think LaFrance is dealing in bad faith, or unperceptive..."
Forget it Jake, it's The Atlantic.
I guess our "thought leaders" are just taking it as given that mere laws would be useless here, a case of King Canute commanding the tides. So just pull up your socks and work harder, we'll out-compete those machines yet! Bullshit. Giving up on the main tool we use to regulate human behavior (and especially commercial behavior) is just stupid fatalism, of the sort that conservatives have always engaged in.
How many of those "nobody wants to work hard anymore" pieces were AI generated?
Give me the first three words of a Tom Friedman column and I'll auto-complete the rest.
"In 6 months"...
"I was just in the Baghdad Green Zone, and my cabdriver..."
Shit, you know the rest.
"we'll out-compete those machines..."
This suggests a text version of the tale of John Henry. "He died with a keyboard in his hand."
Or a phone under his thumbs.